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“A challenge for science” receives the Educaweb Award for Academic and Professional Guidance

02/12/2022

The project “A challenge for science” encourages young people to pursue careers in science and technology by proposing innovative challenges in engineering. The Companies category is endorsed by the Bertelsmann Foundation.

The “A challenge for science” project was recognized in the 15th edition of the Educaweb Awards for Academic and Professional Guidance in the Companies category. The initiative, developed by the Sener Foundation in collaboration with Sener, aims to promote science and technology careers among high school students by presenting and solving innovative challenges in engineering.

The jury determined that “A challenge for science” is suited to the target audience, achieves its goals and is a project that is expected to continue.

The presentation ceremony took place on December 1 at a virtual event attended by the Director of the Sener Foundation, Rosana Madroñal, who thanked Educaweb for the award. She also noted that “we are proud to receive this award from Educaweb, an entity that specializes in academic and professional guidance, for A Challenge for Science. This is a project where, through real engineering challenges, we try to show students what an engineer’s average workday is like and, in short, what their work could be like tomorrow if they decide to study engineering in college.”

During the award ceremony, the CEO of Educaweb, Josep Lluis Segú, stressed that these awards recognize “those projects that are laying the foundations for the future and that really serve to meet the needs of the citizens of this society, which is facing new challenges.” And he added that “the challenge of guidance is to make available to people, both young and old, the information and itineraries that will be used to train the professionals we are going to need.

What is “A challenge for science”?

“A challenge for science” is a project of the Sener Foundation in collaboration with Sener that seeks to promote science and technical careers among young people. It involves presenting actual engineering challenges to high school students. The students then have to find solutions to the problems faced daily by an engineering company. The students’ solutions are subsequently evaluated by Sener personnel and other external collaborators with expertise in these areas of engineering, and the best ones face off in a final between schools.

It is Sener employees who, through a voluntary program with the Sener Foundation, take the project to the school where their children study, or where they themselves studied, present the project and the challenges to the participants, and monitor the students throughout the entire process of designing the solution.

The innovation of the project lies in the types of problems or challenges presented to the students. These are real challenges, the same ones faced by professional engineers, but tailored to the intended audience. By presenting these challenges and developing their own solutions, we make students aware of the typical problems we face as a society and how they can be solved by applying engineering and technology.

Some of the challenges posed to the students involve implementing the circular economy, improving health through engineering, reducing the carbon footprint, alleviating the problem of space trash or issues related to smart cities. This way, the young participants are able to see first-hand how science, technology and engineering serve people in order to improve their quality of life.

This project is being done in collaboration with the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), which is part of the Ministry of Innovation and Science.

Educaweb Awards 2022

The Educaweb Awards for Academic and Professional Guidance were launched in 2008 to mark the 10th anniversary of Educaweb. Their goal is to reward the best academic and professional orientation projects in order to highlight and showcase the work done, often anonymously, by guidance professionals.

In this year’s edition, the following awards were presented:

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